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A guest blog by Ralph Underhill, PIRC Associate and Director of Framing Matters. Framing Matters and Health Poverty Action have just published ‘A Practical Guide for Communicating Global Justice and Solidarity’. Here he introduces common communication traps. President Nixon famously said, “I am not a crook”. With those 5 words, he managed to reinforce theRead more

A guest blog by Ralph Underhill, PIRC Associate and Director of Framing Matters. Framing Matters and Health Poverty Action have just published ‘A Practical Guide for Communicating Global Justice and Solidarity’. Giving to charity is supposed to be a good thing. That is pretty uncontroversial, most people accept that. But what about the word itself?Read more

NGOs—non-governmental organisations—are often used as shorthand for the institutions of the movement. These are the places where there is money, jobs, influence especially with policymakers, and people with paid time to campaign, organise and act for a better world. Many of the people who work in—and lead—these organisations are middle class (and white, and able-bodied,Read more

Part 1 of the "Work In Progress" Series by Tanya HawkesSo, you’re about to recruit?Designing recruitment with equality, fairness and values in mind.

How your organisation employs people is at the heart of its commitment to equality. The advert, application form, interview, the practical test (if you have one) and how you manage probation periods is an opportunity to address internal inequality and help shift the values and culture of your organisation. I’ve worked in charities, NGOs andRead more

Guest post by Jon Alexander, co-author of Think Of Me As Evil? Sir Martin, As one of the authors of the report you cited in your recent piece on advertising, I want to respond to your comments, and to invite you to engage with me in a public dialogue to try to identify a new andRead more

Guest blog by Lara Kirch and Micha Narberhaus at Smart CSOs. As we have experienced in the Smart CSOs community over the last two years, changing an organisation to work on system change is far from an easy task. Most civil society organisations are deeply entrenched in the current system. We might irritate partners and constituencies if we don’tRead more

People who cut their carbon footprint because they’re worried about climate change are ‘environmental’ types, right? They love ‘nature’ and get fired up by those photos of polar bears stranded on melting ice. They might even rate ‘protecting the environment’ or ‘respecting the earth’ as their number one value. Well, no; not necessarily. As partRead more

Che Guevara said that “the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love”. But not just any love, the love of humanity that transcends the day to day love of individuals (our family for example). In a way its a shame that the actual content of this paragraph from Che has been bastardised to beRead more

Rajesh Makwana came to one of our workshops in January and kindly allowed us to repost this article, originally published at Shareable. We are all painfully familiar with the plethora of statistics that illustrate how unsustainable modern lifestyles have become and how humanity is already consuming natural resources far faster than the planet can produceRead more

There are two questions I would like to put to the proponents of Values Modes or Cultural Dynamics (CD). Firstly, is systemic change necessary? In other words: in order to minimise the speed and impact of climate change, do we need to alter any of the fundamental workings of the institutions and machinery of our societyRead more

What difference can a degree or two make? Well the answer, as I’m sure that you will know is a lot. The image below taken from the IPCC’s fourth assessment report (AR4) gives a simple (although now out of date) picture of what a degree means. The impacts and extent of climate change is subtleRead more

Joss Garman is a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK and a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He blogs at: www.jossgarman.com. The respected BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin has published an original but controversial piece criticising the Royal Society, which concludes: “If the great science academies can’t find ways of including the best expertsRead more

The international consensus on global warming has seemingly experienced a spectacular slow-motion train wreck over the last few months, with “climategate” reports piling up in public debate like derailing rail cars filmed in freeze frame. The fascination for on-lookers, however, is that the science itself is largely blameless. Instead, the pile-up stands as a caseRead more

Another batch of private emails from climate scientists has been leaked/hacked/stolen/whatever. These ones, though, are very different than the last. It’s a thread of emails from the NAS (US National Academy of Sciences), and these guys are mad. They are mad about vested interests skewing the discussion. They are mad that journalists have sat andRead more